Bookshelf
If Aesop is right and a man can be judged by the company he keeps a mind can perhaps be judged by the books it reads (or desires to?).
Below are books that I've liked and disliked, loved and hated, laughed about and cried into. Most of them, though, are yet to be read. Of the ones I have read I've starred those I found particular insightful or moving. Just like my physical bookshelf, they are in no particular order. If I've read the book in another language (I squeak by in French and Spanish) I've left it in the original.
Some other people whose book recommendations I always find interesting:
-Patrick Collison
-Tyler Cowen
-Ben Casnocha
In no particular order:
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King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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Hard Landing:The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos
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Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism
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"What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
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The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
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Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science
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The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor
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The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
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A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures)
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Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
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How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
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Moral Man and Immoral Society: A study in Ethics and Politics
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The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
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Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War
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The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild
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Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story
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Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
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Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business
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Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid that Avenged Pearl Harbor
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Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story
- I'm a sucker for spy stories. Jack Devine's career was enormously varied and interesting. Very different perspective on the agency that the one created in popular media. Defends their work during the Allende coup and generally makes the case (quite convincingly) that the CIA's work is a lot more contingent and tenuous than their popular image lets on. Stories of recruiting sources and games with other spy agencies made me realize how tough human spy operations are to pull off.
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- One of the best non fiction books of 2020. Ambitious work that debunks an enormous swath of social science. Countless examples of things we think are true for humans which are really only true for a subset (cleverly termed WEIRD).
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- Fascinating and well researched account of the various peoples that have lived in the region. Was a bit out of my depth in terms of the region's history and the sheer number of characters who are covered. There should be more geographies of places was my main takeaway. That and I'd love the opportunity to spend time in the Himalaya at some point.
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- Couldn't actually get into this. I played Baseball as a kid but this just didn't have the legs for me.
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Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan
- Just finished this excellent, easy read (June 2021). Not as scholarly as Himalaya, more of a travelogue but within the theme of stories about places. Most surprising thing was how different each country seems from her descriptions despite the fact that we tend to lump them in together. Politically, historically (especially recently) and economically the countries are very different. This begs the question that underlies much of the book: are the Stans at all representative of the people living in them or the different tribes and traditions of the region. Probably not. Would like to read her next book The Border
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The Quiet Americans: Four CIA spies at the Dawn of the Cold War